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Wednesday, 7 March 2012

Rachel Cusk: Divorce and Aftermath

Rachel Cusk
is a British writer, who, in case you want to know, is recently divorced. Why
would you want to know—provided you know who Rachel Cusk is in the first place
(although, if you are reading this post, you will have, because I revealed her profession
in the opening sentence)—whether she is married or divorced?

Cusk’s most
recent work of non-fiction is a memoir, and its title is: Aftermath: On Marriage and
Separation.

So you see,
one of the reasons why you might want to know about Rachel Cusk’s marital
status is: she wants you to know; she wants the world to know that she is
divorced. That’s why she has written a book about her divorce (published by
Faber and Faber, £12.99 only).

I don’t know
about you, but for me £12.99 for a book is not cheap. If I am at all to be
persuaded to spend this amount on a book then it has to fulfil at least one of
the three conditions: (1) It must be written by a writer I greatly admire. (2)
The book’s subject holds more fascination for me than a pubescent boy for a
Catholic priest. (3) The book has attracted rave reviews and is considered a
classic or a cult book.

Mind you, I
am not saying that I will buy the book if one or more of the above
conditions are fulfilled. I shall most probably still not buy a hardback
edition and wait instead patiently for the paperback edition to come out.

Back to
Rachel Cusk. She does not fulfil the first condition. I do not admire Rachel
Cusk (as a writer). If you are thinking of forming a Rachel Cusk fan club,
don’t bother to send me the invitation, because I shall politely decline.

I know, I
know: in 2003 Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of ‘thetwenty best of young British novelists’, which, apparently is a big thing
(although to describe Rachel Cusk, who would have been 36 when the list was
published, as ‘young’ is a bit like declaring that you had a filling sushi
meal). Since 1983 Granta (a magazine that no one reads but miraculously still
gets published) has been publishing a list of best of young British novelists
every ten years. While writing this post I looked up the lists out of
curiosity. The lists do contain many writers I admire or have heard of or read
(not knowing they were on the Granta list), but they also have names I don’t
recognise at all. (What does this mean? Is my having heard of a writer’s name
the ultimate test of the writer’s popularity? I’d certainly wish so. But I’d
also wish to spend a night of hot passion with Scarlet Johansson and that weird
girl in the film Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (at the same time). Doesn't mean it
is going to happen.) The point is: getting your name on some obnoxiously
hoity-toity list is not necessarily a guarantee that you will be a successful
writer.

Is Rachel
Cusk a successful writer? Does she sell? Who knows? She certainly has no
difficulty in getting the memoir of her divorce published by Faber and Faber.
So she must be a writer of some standing. Faber and Faber wouldn’t publish just
anybody.

Have I actually
read any of Rachel Cusk’s novels? As it happens, I have. Not one, but two. A
few years ago I read a novel of hers entitled In the Fold. Last year I
read her most recent novel, entitled The Bradshaw Variations.

What did I
make of these two novels? I shall briefly write about The Bradshaw Variations,
which I read only last year. Then I will write (even more briefly) about In
the Fold.

I do not remember a thing about The Bradshaw Variations.
I finished reading it, so it couldn’t have been total dross. But I
remember it being tedious, not least because of Cusk’s ponderous prose which
didn’t clearly convey what she was trying to say. Reading The Bradshaw Variations
was a bit like looking at one of those impressionistic paintings of Monet. You
have no clue whether Monet was trying to depict Paris in rainy season or just
had a fit of sneezes while the wet paint-brush was in his hands.

As for In
the Fold, it too was a masterclass in opaque verbosity.

Rachel Cusk
seems to me to be one of those writers who desperately want to show the world
how very clever and how very profound they are; but end up, instead, writing a
lot of what seems like twaddle about nothing in particular.

I have even
heard Rachel Cusk in a literary programme. She read out from Arlington
Park, which was published in 2006. Again I remember nothing of the
programme other than a pasty white woman reading monotonously a monotonous
passage from what was probably a monotonous book. (I have Arlington Park in my
collection. I have no recollection of buying it. I thought I must have bought
it for a quid from a second-hand bookshop; but when I opened it, it had Rachel
Cusk’s signature with the message that she hoped that I would enjoy the book.
So I must have bought it after the literary programme. I couldn’t tell you
whether I liked it or not, because I haven’t read it, and I am not going to any
time soon.)

I think I
have made it fairly clear that I am not a Rachel Cusk fan; and the Granta
nomination in 2003 notwithstanding, I will be very surprised if anything she
has written will be read in fifty years—since I will most certainly not be
alive in fifty years I won’t actually know whether Cusk’s novels would be in
circulation in fifty years; and, having led an unpious existence in this life,
I am destined to be reincarnated as a cockroach or a rat in the next one—except
perhaps on the book-blogs devoted to
‘supremely talented but cruelly neglected and excessively underrated British
women writers of late twentieth and early twenty-first century’.

What about
the subject matter? Cusk’s memoir is about her divorce. I am pretty sure that
the divorce was protracted and full of rancour. If it was an amicable, mutually
acceptable separation, with both parents deciding act maturely in the best
interest of children, it wouldn’t have been worth writing a book about, would
it? (What would you write? “My husband and I have been aware for some time that
we were drifting apart. I first realised that things were not quite how they
should be in our favourite Italian restaurant—which, by the way, does the most
scrumptious spinach-ricotta cannelloni, and you must have it with a chilled
bottle of Gavi—when I noticed him
desperately trying to suppress a yawn when I was in the middle of explaining to
him the importance of art in human lives. On my part I realised that we were
really not suited for each other. He is earnest, my husband, but he lacks style
and his hair look as if he cuts them with garden shears. These things hurt my
delicate and fragile sensibilities, the downside of being a sensitive (and
talented) artist. When it comes to fine things in life my husband is adequate
in the same way a chiropractor is competent to manage your curved spine but is
no orthopaedic surgeon. So we had a long, heart to heart chat about our future
over breakfast (a strong cup of coffee and toasts). I had to tell my husband
that if I had to survive as an artist we must separate. He was most gracious
about it. He said he fully understood. He would never be able to forgive
himself, he said, if he stifled my creativity even inadvertently. We then had a
frank discussion about financial arrangements. My husband was most
understanding. You see, he gave up his job to look after the house and
children, while I became the breadwinner with my book-writing; but he said that
he did not want me to be lumbered with the worry of providing for him; I must
focus, unhindered, on my writing. He would manage, he said. He would go in the
night to the backs of shops and eat out of bins, but I wasn’t to worry about
providing for him.” Wouldn’t quite be the material of a bestselling book, would
it? What you want, what the readers want, is the mother of all battles, with
your about-to-be-ex husband more bitter than the lemon you squeezed in your gin
and tonic last night.

So, I
started reading the excerpt in the Telegraph, if not exactly trembling
with eager anticipation, then in a spirit of mildly prurient curiosity.

I should
like to say that I managed to reach the end of the excerpt, but I regret to
announce that I didn’t; rather I couldn’t.
Somewhere into the fourth or fifth paragraph, as Cusk preached in her
mannered prose about what it meant to be a feminist in modern world, I lost
consciousness. I guess the pleasures of
reading self-absorbed, self-pitying, whinge palled rather quickly for me.

I can’t
help feeling that when marriages break up, the partners who are established
writers have an unfair advantage. They can get it out of the system by writing
books about them—writing being therapeutic and all that. If the books sell, it
is even better. What about the poor partners? How do they put the whole thing
behind them? They might want to put forth their sides of the story; except they
can’t, because when they try to string sentences together their eyeballs
collide. (Not really fair, is it? But then life is not fair. If life were fair
the British Empire would still be existing, and we would be telling the natives
to hurry up and bring us cool glasses of sherbet.) Last year I read American writer Elizabeth
Gilbert’s Eat Prey and Love. That book (unlike Cusk’s) is not about
Gilbert’s divorce, but there is rather a lot of it in the first few pages in
which, you’d be surprised to learn, Gilbert’s ex-husband comes across as about
as reasonable as a low IQ Tottenham Football Club striker who has been shown a
red card. Now Cusk has turned the break-up of her marriage into a book, £12.99
per copy. How mercenary do you have to be to write a book full of me-me cod
psychology out of the dissolution of your marriage? (On the other hand, you
might say that since the marriage is kaput
anyway, you might as well turn it into some sort of money-making scheme;
and if you end up looking like a narcissist wearing your sense of hurt
sensibilities like a bank robber wearing a hood, it is a small price to pay.)

A few years
ago Julie Myerson, another British novelist, published a novel entitled The
Lost Child. On the eve of the publication of the novel Myerson
publically announced that in the novel there was an entire section that incorporatedan episode involving her real life son Jack, who, according to her, had become
a cannabis addict and whom she was forced to chuck out a few years earlier.
Myerson said that she had decided to go public in order to raise awareness of
the risks of cannabis smoking. This generated a lot of publicity for Myerson
(and her novel, which couldn’t have hurt), not all of which was positive.
Myerson was flabbergasted and aghast and shocked and devastated, so she claimed, when
some questioned her motives behind waiting for almost three years before
deciding to raise public awareness about the hazards of cannabis smoking, the
timing coinciding rather neatly with the publication of her novel, which just
happened to have had a whole section on it.

Cusk is more direct about her
intentions. She has published a memoir about the break-up of her marriage. You
might question the propriety of her actions, but you can’t question her
motives. (Unlike Myerson’s) there is nothing sly about Cusk’s motives. There is
a straightforward assumption that people would want to read about the sordid
dramas of her life, and if they do, she will make money. (My guess is that the
book won’t be a blockbuster because, let’s face it, writers are never going to
be in the same league as footballers and screen personalities when it comes to
popularity; and Cusk, despite the 2003 Granta seal of approval, is not in the
premier league of writers.)

I might
read Cusk’s memoir (third, according to Wikipedia; she has already banged out a
memoir about being a mother (A Life’s Work: On Becoming A Mother)
and a family holiday with her now-ex-husband in Italy (The Last Supper: A Summer in
Italy) if I spot it in the local library; but I don’t think I will
bother buying the book. That is primarily because I don’t rate Cusk highly as a
writer, but also because I find the exercise of commercially exploiting a
family tragedy slightly distasteful.

About Me

Welcome to my blog. This blog is mostly about books—20th and 21st century fiction and some non-fiction, to be precise—but not only about them. I shall be writing about some other interests of mine such as language, music, wine, interesting places I’ve been to, and random topics that happen to interest me at a given point in time.
I mostly read fiction, which comprises almost 90% of my reading.
In the non-fiction category I am interested in language, philosophy, travel, selected history, biographies and memoirs of people who interest me, and wine.
I love spending time in bookshops and attending literary festivals, although I have managed to attend only a few in the past few years.
I shall write on a monthly basis (let’s not be too ambitious) about a book I have read, though not necessarily in that month.
I hope you enjoy browsing through this blog.